May 23, 2017 Published ~ 2 years ago.

Cloud communications company Twilio has announced early access for the new Add-on Management API. Developers can use the Twilio Add-on Management API to programmatically install, configure, and enable Add-ons in applications.

May 22, 2017 Published ~ 2 years ago.

The game results show that placing slightly “noisy” bots in a central location (high-degree nodes) improves human coordination by reducing same-color neighbor nodes (the goal of the game). Square nodes show the bots and round nodes show human players; thick red lines show color conflicts, which are reduced with bot participation (right). (credit: Hirokazu Shirado and Nicholas A. Christakis/Nature)

It’s not about artificial intelligence (AI) taking over — it’s about AI improving human performance, a new study by Yale University researchers has shown.

“Much of the current conversation about artificial intelligence has to do with whether AI is a substitute for human beings. We believe the conversation should be about AI as a complement to human beings,” said Nicholas Christakis, Yale University co-director of the Yale Institute for Network Science (YINS) and senior author of a study by Yale Institute for Network Science.*

AI doesn’t even have to be super-sophisticated to make a difference in people’s lives; even “dumb AI” can help human groups, based on the study, which appears in the May 18, 2017 edition of the journal Nature.

How bots can boost human performance

In a series of experiments using teams of human players and autonomous software agents (“bots”), the bots boosted the performance of human groups and the individual players, the researchers found.

The experiment design involved an online color-coordination game that required groups of people to coordinate their actions for a collective goal. The collective goal was for every node to have a color different than all of its neighbor nodes. The subjects were paid a US$2 show-up fee and a declining bonus of up to US$3 depending on the speed of reaching a global solution to the coordination problem (in which every player in a group had chosen a different color from their connected neighbors). When they did not reach a global solution within 5 min, the game was stopped and the subjects earned no bonus.

The human players also interacted with anonymous bots that were programmed with three levels of behavioral randomness — meaning the AI bots sometimes deliberately made mistakes (introduced “noise”). In addition, sometimes the bots were placed in different parts of the social network to try different strategies.

The result: The bots reduced the median time for groups to solve problems by 55.6%. The experiment also showed a cascade effect: People whose performance improved when working with the bots then influenced other human players to raise their game. More than 4,000 people participated in the experiment, which used Yale-developed software called breadboard.

The findings have implications for a variety of situations in which people interact with AI technology, according to the researchers. Examples include human drivers who share roadways with autonomous cars and operations in which human soldiers work in tandem with AI.

“There are many ways in which the future is going to be like this,” Christakis said. “The bots can help humans to help themselves.”

Practical business AI tools

One example: Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff uses a bot called Einstein to help him run his company, Business Intelligencereported Thursday (May 18, 2017).

“Powered by advanced machine learning, deep learning, predictive analytics, natural language processing and smart data discovery, Einstein’s models will be automatically customised for every single customer,” according to the Salesforce blog. “It will learn, self-tune and get smarter with every interaction and additional piece of data. And most importantly, Einstein’s intelligence will be embedded within the context of business, automatically discovering relevant insights, predicting future behavior, proactively recommending best next actions and even automating tasks.”

Benioff says he also uses a version called Einstein Guidance for forecasting and modeling. It even helps end internal politics at executive meetings, calling out under-performing executives.

“AI is the next platform. All future apps for all companies will be built on AI,” Benioff predicts.

* Christakis is a professor of sociology, ecology & evolutionary biology, biomedical engineering, and medicine at Yale. Grants from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the National Institute of Social Sciences supported the research.

Coordination in groups faces a sub-optimization problem and theory suggests that some randomness may help to achieve global optima. Here we performed experiments involving a networked colour coordination game in which groups of humans interacted with autonomous software agents (known as bots). Subjects (n = 4,000) were embedded in networks (n = 230) of 20 nodes, to which we sometimes added 3 bots. The bots were programmed with varying levels of behavioural randomness and different geodesic locations. We show that bots acting with small levels of random noise and placed in central locations meaningfully improve the collective performance of human groups, accelerating the median solution time by 55.6%. This is especially the case when the coordination problem is hard. Behavioural randomness worked not only by making the task of humans to whom the bots were connected easier, but also by affecting the gameplay of the humans among themselves and hence creating further cascades of benefit in global coordination in these heterogeneous systems.

May 22, 2017 Published ~ 2 years ago.

This software is still in development, so we don’t recommend you run it on a production site. Consider setting up a test site just to play with the new version. To test WordPress 4.8, try the WordPress Beta Tester plugin (you’ll want “bleeding edge nightlies”). Or you can download the beta here (zip).

For more information on what’s new in 4.8, check out the Beta 1 blog post. Since then, we’ve made over 50 changes in Beta 2.

May 22, 2017 Published ~ 2 years ago.

May 21, 2017 Published ~ 2 years ago.

Over the years one of the criticisms of RSS 2.0, the version of RSS that enabled podcasting, is that it only allowed one enclosure per item.

This was a deliberate decision. I was aware at the time that there was a choice. I went with the one-to-one correspondence. There were two reasons, a design question and to keep it simpler for developers and podcast listeners.

Suppose you allowed an arbitrary number of enclosures. Wouldn’t you want to be able to describe each? If so, an enclosure would morph from being a simple three-attribute element, to a structure. What would be the new sub-elements? One obvious one would be <description>. How about a title? A date? Category? Author? I’m sure you see where this is going. We just created a new <item> inside an enclosure. And could an enclosure have an enclosure? Why not? Isn’t that more powerful? (The reason usually given for having more enclosures.)

The second reason is that you made life more complicated for the aggregator developer. When they look for an enclosure they somehow have to decide which of the multiple enclosures the user wants, or offer a choice to the user. Does the user really care what format the podcast is in? When I’m listening what I want is to hear the podcast. You want me to choose? My life is already too complicated. Too much software interrupts the flow of my thought with questions I have no interest in.

May 19, 2017 Published ~ 2 years ago.

A look at extreme and stormy weather around the globe. From devastating tornadoes to record-breaking heat, photographers covered various forms of wild weather this month.
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By Leanne Burden SeidelA supercell thunderstorm develops May 8 in Elbert County outside of Limon, Colorado.
(Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

May 19, 2017 Published ~ 2 years ago.

On Monday, i took you on a quick walk through the exhibition of the Economia festival in Eindhoven. Today I’m going to share a few short films, animations and documentaries i discovered over the 3 days i spent there. The screenings exposed the world of finance under the most human perspectives: from the bank robbery that goes terribly wrong to an economic system so complex they become incomprehensible for humans, from the bankers trying in vain to avoid massive troubles to people forming endless queues in order to receive free soup and bread, etc.

There were some real gems in the film program put up by Baltan Laboratories and the invited curators but i’m going to tell you only about the ones you can watch online for free:

While he was in China studying urbanization and real estate speculation, David Borenstein discovered the existence of ‘foreigner agencies’ that hire European, Indian, African and American expats to help real estate developers market their new developments and turn remote ghost towns into ‘globalized cities’ on the days that investors and potential buyers visit. All the foreigners have to do is pose as investors, buyers, or ‘superstars’. Borenstein calls these jobs ‘white monkey gigs’. The festival screened the feature length documentary, called Dream Empire, but Borenstein also did a short film for the new york times that sums up the phenomenon and that’s the one you can watch above.

Isle of Flowers is an amazing Brazilian pseudo-documentary short film by Jorge Furtado. The 1989 film follows the path of a tomato from the field to the supermarket to a perfume saleswoman’s kitchen to a landfill outside of the city.

Each stage in the journey of the tomato requires the exchange of money. Until it is judged unfit for consumption by the woman, thrown in the garbage, and unloaded in a landfill. There, it becomes part of the organic material selected by farmers to be given to pigs as food. The rest, which is considered inadequate for the pigs, is given to poor children and women to collect and eat.

The film talks with humor about the absurdity of consumerism and about our indifference to the suffering of other human beings.

Bela Tarr, Prologue, 2004

Prologue is part of “Visions of Europe”, a 25-film anthology made by film directors from the European Union. Prologue is Hungarian film director Béla Tarr’s sharp and remarkably poignant view of Europe.

In One thousand four hundred and ninety two fifty two, Scott Massey attempts to convince a bank employee to pay off his overdraft using the words, ‘one thousand four hundred and ninety two fifty two’ as payment. He recorded the dialogue with a hidden microphone.

The city of Kangbashi is one of the most famous ‘ghost cities’ of China. The images of empty streets and light shows that no one sees are accompanied by a voice-over telling the modern fable about a cathedral built of money.

Yorgos Zois, Casus Belli, 2010

As film director Yorgos Zois writes: People standing in line; all in order. Everyone is starving for something: products, entertainment, religion, art, money. But in the last queue they are all starving for… food. It’s the queue of personal survival. If the food ends, then disorder begins. And if one man falls, we all fall down.

Nathaniel Sullivan, Before the Nation Went Bankrupt, 2016

Before the Nation Went Bankrupt tells the story of the financial crisis through the fictional love letters that JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon wrote to his wife, daughter, mistress 1, mistress 2, etc. He writes these messages as the financial crisis is about to change the world. More precisely, during the weekend he spent at the Federal Reserve, in Manhattan, summoned along with the CEOs of the biggest banks to save the world economy from ruin. Or rather to save themselves from ruin.

Adam Curtis, The Century of the Self (Part 1: “Happiness Machines”), broadcast on 29th April 2002

The Century of the Self is a 2002 tv documentary series by Adam Curtis. Episode one, Happiness Machines, exposes how Sigmund Freud’s theories were used by PR gurus and politicians to manipulate the masses. The central figure in the film is Edward Bernays, a pioneer in the public relations profession who showed American politicians and corporations how, by satisfying the inner irrational desires that Freud had identified, the masses could be made happy, gullible and docile.

Francois Alaux, Hervé de Crécy & Ludovic Houplain, Logorama, 2009

Logorama is a clever action-packed film told entirely through the use of more than 2,500 brand logos and mascots. Ronald McDonald is the villain, Michelin Men play the cops, the Green Giant is in charge of security at the zoo, etc.

This short animation film by Santiago Grasso received 105 awards. It’s quite good but not 105 awards good, imho. Maybe the jurors were surprised by the ending (i saw it coming way before the guy left his house and i’m not even that clever at guessing the end of books.)